More than 1,200 people attended the Woronora Memorial Park’s Rose Festival last Saturday, making it the largest in the history of the event.

They enjoyed more than 100,000 blooms of vibrant colour and perfume smells in their full spring glory in the memorial park’s gardens which made for a blooming good festival.

Experts from the cemetery’s operational teams provided the guided tours to illustrate rose techniques and tips for healthy roses and show how the cemetery manages to maintain one of the best rose gardens in the country.

Swanes Nursery set up a tent near to the Rose Society of NSW where teams of experts answered questions from rose enthusiasts, some of whom had travelled from the Central Coast and the northern beaches of Sydney for the festival.

Rose Society of NSW president Colin Hillis said that he was very impressed with the quality of the roses and with how many visitors had made highly positive comments, particularly about the variety of roses.

A big crowd-pleaser was the rose tea garden party set up in an area near the South Chapel.

Families queued to drink rose tea at Celeste Cottage with the restaurant’s staff also handing out several hundred free scones with jam and cream.

Cemetery staff working at the free sausage sizzle barbecue were busy, with 1,000 sausages gone before lunch-time.

Woronora Memorial Park chief executive officer Graham Boyd said that the Rose Festival proved to be a wonderful opportunity to both engage with the community as well as demystify what goes on at a cemetery and crematorium.

“We were delighted by the number of visitors who involved themselves in this side of the Rose Festival, asking questions not only about roses but also questions about how the cemetery and crematoria operates,” Mr Boyd said.

The 2017 Rose Festival is a biannual event and showed how popular ‘a day out with a difference’ can be.

“After this year’s success, we’re looking forward to making the next event in 2019 something that our community will look forward to attending.”